How Close Are We to the End Times?

A piece on the future as it gradually unwraps for our view on truthdig.com, “Growth is the Problem,” by Chris Hedges (link), prompted Brigitte to wonder what the social conditions were like in Rome just before the Roman Empire collapsed. Good question—but really a trick question. Arguably we have not yet reached that stage in civilization matching the end of Rome. That began around about the time of Diocletian (244-311 AD) when that emperor partitioned the Roman Empire in 295 AD. In our times, in the United States, we’re still waiting, as it were, for that decisive marker, the crossing of the Rubicon (49 BC)—the first clear sign that the end of the Republic has arrived. But let us take a look at what led up to that.

In 494 BC the Roman Republic was just 15 years old when a general strike, as we would call it today—they called it the Secession of the Plebs—signaled a period known as the Conflict of the Orders, thus between the Patricians (call them the oligarchy of the wealthy) and the Plebeians (call them the common people, more recently the 99%, more recently yet, the 47%). The first consul of the republic, one Appius Claudius Sabinus Inregillensis, behaved so harshly that the common people left the city en masse and repaired to one of the hills of Rome (Mons Sacer), and effectively shut down the economy. This resulted in the creation of the representatives (tribunes) of the people. The first Secession of the Plebs was followed by others in 449, 445, 342, and 287 BC. Hence the Conflict of the Orders was said to extend 494-287, a period of 207 years. But, in fact, that conflict never really ended until the Roman Empire dawned  with Octavian’s ascension to the throne in 27 BC.

The formation of the Plebeian Council, which elected tribunes, became functionally similar to a lower house. In fact it was more powerful, eventually, than the Senate of Rome. It came to represent what today we’d call the Left—and its principal strategy was income redistribution, its secondary but closely related strategy was distribution of power—to its own members and to the lesser nobility, the equites or knights. Income in the Roman context was land. Land to be distributed was land conquered by Roman armies.

Concerning land, it was the emblem of the franchise itself. Land-owning plebeians were entitled to vote—and also obliged to serve in the military. The Romans were straightforward realists. Material power was political power. The abstract notion of individual liberty had not yet dawned. We have to thank Christianity for that.

The end-times of the Republic really began in the second century BC when the Gracchi brothers, Tiberius Gracchus (162-133 BC) and Gaius Graccchus (154-121 BC) both tribunes, passed laws distributing land to the plebs; both were murdered in the convulsions that resulted. Despite such setbacks in detail—and the Senate was oblige to accept some of the reforms voted into place to avoid massive conflagrations—the Plebs gradually gained more and more power in Rome. Its tribunes would eventually hold the Consulship and the Censorship and acquired seats in the Senate itself.

At the same time—and such is real life—periods of crack-down appeared, most notably during the right-wing dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138-78 BC). But the impulse set in motion by the first Secession of the Plebs continued right on after Sulla’s death and produced, first, Caesar and then the caesars.

The historical path described here is one beginning with the dictatorial monarch, in this case Lucius Lavinius Superbus (535-496 BC), to the arising of Augustus (63 BC - 14 AD). Augustus, known as Octavian before he took power, hailed from the equestrian branch of a plebeian family—but he had been raised to patrician rank by adoption by Julius Caesar. (That, by the way, tells you how the poor (plebeian), grown wealthy (equestrian), could be enlisted in the ranks of the nobility (patrician) by adoption. In our pre-democratic times the method was to marry a wealthy daughter into the nobility.) Between those two monarchs lay a period of 482 years during which an oligarchy ruled, was gradually weakened, and totalitarianism became possible again.

Now for those who dream of reestablishing the old-fashioned patrician rule over the masses, all I can say is—dream on. And those who dream of the ultimate victory of the 99 percent, they’re also just dreaming. When the left finally wins, what follows then is military rule. Want to secure your long term future? Join the Army. If we follow anything like the Roman pattern, we are now still in the midst of the battle between the patricians and the plebs. We’ve clocked 236 years from the establishment of our own republic. If the same pattern holds, the crossing of the Rubicon will take place circa 2236—and then roughly another 300++ years of empire are waiting before the end times even begin. Now, of course, the two situations have major dissimilarities. For instance. We’ll have run out of fossil fuels when the next century begins. And that may speed things up a little…

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My illustrative emblem, the icon of the Roman Empire, comes from Wikipedia (link). The acronym stands for Senātus Populusque Rōmānus (“The Senate and People of Rome”).

The Lens of History

I’ve been attracted throughout my life to methods of seeing that which is much smaller or much greater than eye can focus. We don’t need tools at our own natural scale. We need not engage in social science to understand our own clan—meaning all the people to whom we are related by blood or marriage. The eyes and ears suffice. When ours was a young family first sinking roots in the United States, we didn’t even need a bank statement to know our net worth. We had a sheaf of treasury notes accumulated during service in the Army, and we could just count the envelopes; and we kept most of the money we earned at the apartment in cash.

Later I learned the power of statistics—and came to admire and value the services of our statistical agencies. Doubtless the greatest humanity has ever produced are resident, right now, right here in the United States. This is not an exaggeration. A start at celebrating them is recorded here, but I haven’t gone beyond an introduction. In any case, there is nothing quite like lenses that will bring the seemingly invisible into focus, and therefore praises to the makers of the Hubble telescope and NASA for putting it up in the sky; and equal praises to honor Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), one of the modern day’s pioneers.

Knowledge dependents on pattern-acquisition, as it were: seeing enough of very large things so that their lawful behavior becomes evident. And in this category I also place mythologies at the exalted and histories at the mundane end of the spectrum. Mythologies sum up the totality of human intuition about the nature of transcendental reality. History is our lens for understanding the immediate arrangements of society writ large.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of posts back, I was looking back at Rome again. I’m now and have always been fascinated by the transition between the republican era and the later monarchical phases, the Roman Empire. It really was monarchical although the Romans did not want to use the word “king.” The imperator was what we call “commander-in-chief,” and I smile a little in noting how that phrase developed legs during the last administration; so did the word “decider.” But never mind that. I would emphasize that the transit of Rome from republic to empire was not some kind of symbolical transformation of the sort our modern media love to engineer and then to detect in what they are pleased to call analysis. No. The transition followed a century of social disturbance beginning around 133 BC and ending in 27 BC. It was a period in which the powerful and moneyed oligarchy that ruled Rome was first challenged in 133 by the election of Tiberius Gracchus, restored to dominance by Sulla (around 82 BC), followed by Caesar’s rise to power after a major civil war (48 BC), and ending with the rise to power of Caesar’s adoptive son, Octavian (later Augustus) in 27 BC.

Worth noting here is that this brief period holds most of the events and the personalities the American public knows about Rome from the movies: Caesar, Cleopatra, Anthony, and Brutus. A few other, later figures appear because they were particularly violent: Caligula, Nero.

Ultimately the battle here was between the moneyed class of large scale ownership (in the Roman context this meant the ownership of land and slaves)—and the people without means or relying on small parcels of land, handicrafts, or shops. The power, when it finally shifted, came to be vested in the state (not the little people), the state controlled by a single person, and that person backed by armed forces of which he was the commander-in-chief, thus imperator. The emperor also held all other meaningful political offices for life. As a tribune-for-life he had absolute veto powers over legislation, as censor-for-life he could order a census or appoint or remove senators, he was princeps of the Senate, meaning “first, most eminent, chief”; from this word we get the later meaning of prince. He was also the pontiff, thus the chief religious officer—butI need not go on. He essentially formulated, proposed, and caused legislation to be passed and then enforced by a bureaucracy consisting principally of his own servants, free and slave. The state had become the sole ruler and the emperor the sole ruler of the state. The Republic of Rome came into being in 509 BC and ended with Caesar in 48—a span of 461 years. The Empire lasted to about 476 AD, thus another five centuries. After the imperial period began, the change in power was never again a collective enterprise. It took place by family arrangement or by violent intervention backed by a military force.

What brought the transition about? The abuse of money-power. In the Roman setting it took the form of vast importation of slaves who displaced and impoverished the ordinary citizen. And in our case? We need but look around.

Let’s use the lens of history to look at our times. Using it suggests that those who say that we’re in an imperial time today are just idly chattering, symbol-mongering. No. We’ll know it when it comes. We’re presently enduring the misrule of a vast moneyed oligarchy. But other illusions need also to be set aside. Those who dream of revolution, whereby the “little people” will finally take power from the forces of capital, should not romantically imagine a process that will end in “direct democracy.” Never. Democracy—the kind we actually value, the kind that is still practiced at the local level of small communities—belongs to a middle stage of civilization, the time when the middle class actually has power. When that class gets shouldered aside by the vast oligarchies that currently rule us, the stage is being set for a century of chaos. That century will be violent—as were the 106 years that separated the tribune Gracchus from the emperor Augustus. After that the vote won’t matter any more. But a kind of order will return. And at the working level—which never really changes—the responsible people will, once again, clear off the rubble, mop up the blood, and get back to doing the necessary.